Development of Bio-inspired Underwater Robot with Adaptive Morphology Capable of Multiple Swimming Modes

Bio-inspired underwater robots have several benefits compared to traditional underwater vehicles such as agility, efficiency, and an environmentally friendly body. However, the bio-inspired underwater robots developed so far have a single swimming mode, which may limit their capability to perform different tasks. This paper presents a re-configurable bio-inspired underwater robot that changes morphology to enable multiple swimming modes: octopus-mode and fish-mode. The robot is 60 cm long and 50 cm wide, weighing 2.1 kg, and consists of a re-configurable body and 8 compliant arms that are actuated independently by waterproof servomotors. In the robot, the octopus-mode is expected to perform unique tasks such as object manipulation and ground locomotion as demonstrated in literature, while the fish-mode is promising to swim faster and efficiently to travel long distance. With this platform, we investigate effectiveness of adaptive morphology in bio-inspired underwater robots. For this purpose, we evaluate the robot in terms of the cost of transport and the swimming efficiency of both the morphologies. The fish-mode exhibited a lower cost of transport of 2.2 and higher efficiency of 1.2 % compared to the octopus-mode, illustrating the effect of the multiple swimming modes by adaptive morphology.

Presented at:

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Vancouver, Canada, September 24–28